A Killing Night mf-4

by Jonathon King

  "I'll be the dishwasher, of course. Work for meals only."

  I joined Billy out on the patio where the breeze was coming in off the ocean. It was in the low seventies, same temperature, I knew, as the water. Billy had rolled back his sliding windows, but I knew that he also had the A.C. working inside, if for nothing else than to keep the humidity level down to protect his paintings. Sometimes he did this in midsummer, unruffled by the expense and waste of energy. I knew the kind of oppressive and foul air he'd grown up with in the row houses of north Philly. This was Billy's way of pushing that past back, of exerting his power, even over the weather itself. A few boat lights blinked out on the horizon. One hundred thirty feet below, the surf made the sound of a drummer's slow brushes on a snare head.

  "So how was it, rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers the other night?" I asked.

  He smiled, looking out into the night, and shook his head.

  "I d-didn't know why I was anxious, Max. Maybe because of b-being linked with Diane. On m-my own, I frankly don't give a damn. It's one of the beauties of l-lonely success."

  He stopped, took a drink from his wine and cut a look at me. If we had reached out and clinked bottle to glass it would not have been any more obvious. We punched at each other's psyches like this often. We knew each other well.

  "I've b-been in that company before, of course. And d-deep down, they're just capitalists. You m-mention the name of a stock that you know everyone is hearing rumblings about. You sp-speak knowledgeably about real estate movements. You agree, even slightly, with a brokerage firm's st-stand on the Republican governor's tax relief on capital gains. Hell, when it c-comes to money, every one in that circle is green, Max."

  "So I take it that suit you were wearing made enough of a statement that you didn't have to?" I said.

  "The women were entranced and only a handful of the men knew what they were looking at, other than a high price tag," Diane said as she stepped onto the patio and slipped her arm through Billy's. "He was the talk of the town."

  "Without having to t-talk m-myself."

  I could not tell whether the slight glow of the moment was balanced between them, or whether hers was spilling onto my friend, enveloping him in the bubble of her optimism. It was like stepping closer to someone else's campfire. Even if the warmth wasn't of your making it made you feel better and a cold man would find it impossible to resist. Diane had that way about her and I was both happy for Billy and a little jealous.

  "If you gentlemen are ready," she said, breaking the moment. "Dinner is served."

  We ate at the dining room table again, which had always been Billy's habit. He liked being surrounded by his paintings and sculptures and always served on china and crystal. I had even learned to eat in his home without bringing a beer bottle to the table.

  Yet Billy was also not one for dinnertime small talk. And as usual he had sensed my reluctance to ask what I'd come to ask.

  "So what's up w-with Sherry and this O'Shea?" he said, never shy of cutting straight to it.

  "She's still got a bead on him. He's still hanging around, worried that she's going to grab him up."

  "So why doesn't he skip the country?" Diane suddenly said, causing both of us to look at her. "I mean, come on, he knows the system and is paranoid enough about your friend Richards picking him up, I would think he'd take the chance to get out of the country before they find a body someplace and connect him."

  If no nonsense was an attractive character trait, no wonder these two were together.

  "Money?" Billy offered.

  "Hell, an ex-cop from the States could find work in South America without much trouble," I said.

  "Family?"

  "I didn't get that sense from his ex-wife. They never had kids."

  "Has to be somebody he cares about?"

  "Richards says he lives alone and the way he's playing the bar scene, I don't think so."

  Diane was watching us with a bemused look on her face until Billy noticed it.

  "What?" he said.

  "Maybe this man is innocent," she said.

  Billy slipped his hand over and touched his fingertips on the back of his fiancee's wrist.

  "An interesting position, coming from a future judge," he said and smiled at her. "And I b-believe Max was finally getting to that part."

  He looked, expectantly, at me. Billy was good at watching my internal arguments. Sometimes he was even better at recognizing when I'd come to a decision than I was.

  "I think O'Shea needs a lawyer," I said, throwing it straight out there.

  Billy cut his eyes to Diane, she to him.

  Then I told them both of Richards's plan to arrest O'Shea on the assault charge, about the tactic she used to get inside his apartment with the hope of finding something to connect him with the missing girls.

  "Was she successful?" Diane asked.

  "I don't know. O'Shea called me and said they'd confiscated his boots. Richards was figuring on bloodstain to connect him with the assault, but he didn't say what else they might have taken."

  "It would be easy enough to get a copy of the warrant, see what they took out of the place," Diane said, the lawyer in her, working it even as an unconscious reaction.

  "If he g-gets arrested, you just sh-show up at magistrate's court as an eyewitness and squelch the p-prosecutor's p-probable cause by entering an affidavit that you two were the ones who were attacked."

  "Through who, Billy?" I said. "The public defender who's just going through the morning cattle call? You know how that works in front of a judge who's probably on rotation for three weeks because everyone hates that duty."

  Billy and Diane again looked at each other. They knew I was right.

  "The guy needs a lawyer," I repeated.

  I knew what I was asking of my friend, who had not spoken in open court since his days in college when his law degree required him to display his stutter in front of fellow students. I knew he loathed the idea of revealing his flaw and giving others a reason to think they had some advantage over him.

  "Can I get anyone coffee?" Diane said, standing to clear the table and then going to the kitchen without an answer which she knew she already had.

  "I'd just hate to see the guy standing up there with no one to throw another possibility across the judge's bench," I said.

  "The magistrate judge isn't likely to listen any more to Billy than she would the public defender, Max," Diane said from the kitchen. "Unless they try something outrageous like asking for no bond."

  This time I knew she was right. But I also knew that if they were holding O'Shea on assault charges it would just bolster any argument the prosecutor made to a grand jury on filing an abduction and homicide rap on the guy later. I could hear it clearly in my head: "I know the evidence is circumstantial, ladies and gentlemen, but our suspect was also recently arrested for a violent act which shows his penchant for aggression."

  Billy was quiet. Even as a behind-the-scenes litigator, he knew the workings and the working flaws in the system. He also knew that a lawyer can get a leg caught in the machinery and get pulled in, just as a suspect can. I was asking him to risk that chance that he might be pulled into an arena that he had avoided his entire career.

  "O'Shea says he has nothing to do with these disappearances, Billy. And he asked me to help him."

  "D-Do you trust him?"

  I hesitated, something a good attorney would never do, whether they were convinced or not. People familiar with the working of courtrooms know that truth and justice are only in the eye of the beholder. The best lawyers know that their job is only to convince that beholder of their version.

  I knew I could never accept that role and I knew Billy well enough to know how he disdained it.

  "My gut tells me he's not involved," I said. "But I could be giving him more benefit than he deserves. The guy did save me from a hole in the back ten years ago."

  Diane brought over the coffee, put mine in front of me and then sat next to B
illy.

  "Do you want to t-tell me that part?"

  Even if he did phrase it as such, I knew it wasn't really a question. While I told the story, I went through the entire pot of strong Colombian blend. Diane got up twice to refill her wineglass. I reconstructed the drug bust on South Street and how O'Shea must have been listening in on the tack channel that night and horning in on the action. But there was also no doubt that he'd kept the drug runner from using the handgun I neglected to frisk him for. I could have been dead in the street, another cop funeral in the family.

  I told them of my interviews with O'Shea's ex-wife and my trip to the IAD office. When I mentioned Meagan's name, Billy looked up into my eyes. He would let me gloss over it, but I was using truth to base my assumption of O'Shea's innocence on. When Diane heard that I had been married to an aggressive, type-A personality who was always bent on being the alpha-male of her block, she kept her eyes on the rim of her glass. But I could see the twitch at the corners of her mouth.

  I stopped talking and she finally looked up.

  "What?"

  "It only lasted two years," I said defensively.

  "I'm surprised."

  "At what?"

  "That it went that long."

  She waited a beat.

  "Any children?"

  "No. Thank God," I said. "She would have eaten her young."

  Diane coughed into her glass. Billy patted her back.

  "Sorry," she finally said.

  I smiled and shook my head. Billy brought us back on line.

  "OK. If I was his lawyer. If," he said. "I would obviously argue f-for no crime to begin with. No body. No evidence. But say it m- moves to indictment anyway. Then as an attorney I try to sh-show that someone else could be responsible. Who? What kind of man abducts grown, s-smart single women whose only similarity is their chosen work?"

  "Someone who's a psycho, but a different one," said Diane, rejoining us. She had switched her drink to ice water in a crystal tumbler.

  "If I put myself behind that bar, I see the same group of guys every night waving their dicks around trying to show who can snag the attention of the good-looking bartender. So to be successful, this one's got to have a different schtick."

  "Your honor!" Billy said in mock horror. "Waving their…"

  "And at the risk of sounding shallow," I interrupted, "he's good- looking himself. She's probably got a target-rich environment, if you know what I mean. She knows she's onstage and can pick from the audience."

  "Someone in their age r-range, I would suspect. M-Maybe a little older."

  "But not Daddy," Diane said. "You said your friend Richards profiled these girls as being far from home, not necessarily close to family, independent-minded. I see that as a girl running away from Daddy, not to one."

  "Someone who appears stable. Has a job. Isn't in there scraping change together or begging off a tab. These girls have seen enough of that."

  "Someone s-safe. Or p-perceived to be safe," said Billy. "They see a lot of quick hit hustle going on b-between pickup and bar stool relationships every night."

  "All right," said Diane. "We've got a good-looking guy with an aura of something out of the ordinary who appears stable, self- sufficient, not boring, smart and makes you feel safe."

  The table went quiet for too long. I was staring into my coffee cup and when I raised my eyes they were both looking at me.

  "Where were you on the night of January third?" Diane said with that mischievous look in her eyes.

  "It fits you, M-Max. And your friend, O'Shea," Billy said.

  "Who doesn't trust a cop, off-duty, in a bar?" Diane said. "Especially a blue-collar girl from a blue-collar neighborhood."

  "I'm not a cop anymore, and neither is O'Shea," I said, going on the defensive.

  "The problem with all this dime-store psychoanalysis is that none of us knows what the women were looking for to let themselves fall into this trap. And that's if they fell at all and aren't tending bar in Cancun or Freeport or Houston for Christ's sake," I said. "And what's the killer's motive in all this if they were abducted?"

  This time I got up myself and poured the final cup from the coffeemaker.

  "They're lonely, Max," Diane said, answering the first question. "You don't use logic to explain what one person sees in another to save them from loneliness."

  She slipped her hand under Billy's.

  "Just like m-most abusers, rapists, it's not about sex," Billy said. "The guy is trying to control something and can't, not even himself."

  "Colin O'Shea doesn't want control that bad," I said. "Hell. He never wanted it when he did have it."

  "I agree," said Billy.

  "Yeah?"

  "Yes. If he gets arrested, Max. Tell him t-to call m-me."

  "I appreciate it, Billy," I said, and looked at Diane, who was now squeezing Billy's hand.

  "And let's all pray for Cancun," Diane said.

  CHAPTER 17

  Marci woke Sunday morning thinking: "How did I do this to myself again?"

  She could feel it hardening in the back of her head, that uncomfortable guilt and self-admonishment like she'd put off studying for a midterm until the date of the test or once again forgotten to check the oil in her car and knew that her father would back it out to move it from blocking his truck and see the light on and say "Didn't I tell you? That engine is going to seize up on you, young lady, and that's it. You're walking."

  But this was worse. She was in too deep again with a man and shit, she was starting to tell it wasn't going to work. She was lying in bed, naked under just a sheet and watching the lines of sunlight streak through the blinds and crawl across the wall. It had to be eleven. He'd been gone since seven because he was working that daytime alpha shift or whatever they called it. She pressed a pillow tighter in between her legs and felt the bruise on the outside of her thigh. It was still that high, purple color of an underripe plum and was just getting a thin ring of yellow around its edge. He'd punched her a good one when she grabbed the cell phone out of his hand and kept right on bitching about him checking all her call-back log numbers.

  OK, maybe she was overreacting. It was just his nature, wanting to know everything about her and who she was talking to all the time. It's what cops do, right? Born investigators and always need to know what's going on, he said. Christ knows she'd been with guys who didn't want to know a damn thing about her except whether she'd put out on the first half-drunken date. And so what if he called her at work a dozen times a night? He just wanted to hear her voice, he said. He was always asking if she could get out early because he missed her. Shit, when was the last time she had a boyfriend who showed her that much attention?

  She rolled over to her nightstand and took a drink from the bottle of spring water. There was an empty tumbler next to it that he'd filled with Maker's Mark. The man could drink. Her daddy would be pissed off about that, pull that holier-than-thou on her even if he was the one who got her that first bartending job at the VFW in Eagleton. But the police officer part, he'd be proud of that. A law- abiding, respected man who would protect you when I'm gone. And he'd been gone, what, four years now?

  She could still see him sometimes in her worst dreams at night, coming through the mudroom door, stumbling, and her father never stumbled. The frigid air from outside seemed to have ushered him in, the white vapor billowing off his overalls and jacket and coming with short, erratic puffs from the misshapen hole of a mouth. His big jaw was lopsided and hanging like a flour box tilted and about to fall off the edge of a counter.

  "Daddy?" She could hear herself say the word and the brittle sound of it usually jerked her out of her sleep before she had to endure the sight of him falling, helplessly, against gravity and death to the linoleum floor. One eye was dropped and already sightless, but the other was clear and blue and wide like he was trying to record as much of his daughter's image as he could in the seconds he had left.

  She had stood alone next to an uncle at her father's burial. The
marble marker that held her mother's name, the one she had been taught to pray at from the time of her first memories, was replaced by a single headstone bearing both her parents' names. For some reason when she recalled that day, she remembered the clods of earth piled up on the grave, misshapen hunks yanked out of the frozen ground and too ice-hardened to smooth out. And she also remembered swearing to herself, "To hell with the rules. I'm leaving this place before it kills me."

  Yes, Daddy would like the idea of her dating a cop. But he wouldn't like the rule breaking. And man could Kyle break the rules. That thing with the patrol car on the expressway. She thought she was going to pee! Then the drinking, while he was driving! "So what's to worry? They're not exactly going to pull me over."

  And that time he was picking her up and before she could get to the curb those punks with the leather and nose-buttons started wolfing on her? She'd never seen anyone move so fast. She had ignored the two and went to open Kyle's passenger door and all she could figure later was that he had popped open his own side at the same time. When she sat down and her eyes cleared the roofline, he was gone, like a magic trick. A yelp from the sidewalk snapped her head around and there he was. One of the rivet boys was up against the wall of Nadine's Nail Design, hands up flat on the brick, legs spread and shaky. Kyle had the other one hooked by a fistful of black T-shirt and she heard the splat of that police billy club thing against the slick leather of his pant leg. When Kyle had them both against the wall she could tell he was talking but keeping his tone low, like he did sometimes with her when he got pissed and all she could hear was that low bass rumbling that came from his chest. She stayed in her seat, knew, even that early in their relationship, not to enter that bristling zone of electric air that surrounded him.

  He was up close to the guys, in between them, his jaws working and both of them seemed like they didn't even want to turn their heads to look at him. She could tell what he was doing with the club that was now in front of him. She thought he was going to step down when the one on the left bobbed his head, saying something, and suddenly Kyle had a piece of the guy's ear, ring and all, in his grip, stretching it like the guy was some kinda Gumby toy and she could hear the dude whining: "OK, OK, man. OK."